Division within the Oracle / MySQL debate

Tuesday Feb 2nd 2010 by DatabaseJournal.com Staff

Share:

Many believe that Oracle will have the upper hand within proprietary and open-source database markets.

While Oracle, with the purchase of Sun Microsystems, has been catapulted into server, storage, processor, networking, and even switch markets it would seem that the biggest debate revolves around the database markets. Who would have thought that an open-source database would cause such debate from all corners of the world and create such division within the database community?

Clearly the concern of Oracles ownership of MySQL revolves around the long-care issue of the open-source databasestating that MySQL actually competes with Oracles proprietary database and creates a conflict of interest for Oracle.

Others take a more liberal opinion and believe Oracle has the right to acquire MySQLassuming Oracle will keep MySQL and proprietary databases separate and actually continue to invest in MySQL. Some of the more enlightening comments come from Larry Alston, vice president of marketing and product management at EnterpriseDB, stating that

"They may formalize the licensing and pricing, but we actually think Oracle might invest in MySQL more than Sun did," and "Ultimately, Oracle could be a better home for MySQL. That being said, once MySQL is integrated into Oracle, it will be difficult for anyone to consider MySQL a truly independent, community-driven open-source project."

And for those that think the Oracle acquisition give Oracle an upper hand in the whole proprietary / open-source database world, Alston also assuredly stated that

"For the last several months weve seen a steady stream of MySQL users looking to us for migration tools to Postgres, and we expect that trend to continue and even accelerate now that the EU has made its decision. PostgreSQL will continue to thrive because of its growing community and rock-solid development efforts. EnterpriseDB will float because of that."